Comeback in Broad Day
by Wintertime
Summary: Three years ago, Greg Sanders vanished on a routine investigation. When he resurfaces, he isn't himself, and he's not sure he wants to be.
1. Extraction

Comeback in Broad Day

_Comeback in broad day_

_To the same place, the same face, the same brute_

_Amused shout:_

_"A miracle!"_

_That knocks me out._

_There is a charge_

_For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge_

_For the hearing of my heart - -_

_It really goes._

_And there is a charge, a very large charge_

_For a word or a touch_

_Or a bit of blood_.

- Sylvia Plath

**Chapter One: Extraction**

David Kiley was tired of waiting.

One minute, he'd been winning at blackjack, and the next, he was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a tiny room while one man after another came in and asked him a boringly predictable series of questions. His name. His age. His job. His address. It was the way they were looking at him that started to be frustrating after a while - - they all looked like they were interviewing Lazarus, and stared too intently at him when he answered their questions. They all developed nervous tics. They sucked on the tips of their pencils, they chewed on the earpieces of their glasses, they drummed their fingers against the table. And every time he produced an answer, they visibly started, surprised.

As if there were something really strange, all of a sudden, about who he was.

A fourth man came in through the door, and David leaned back in his chair to try and get a glimpse of what was happening in the hall. He'd seen enough cop movies to know that someone was probably watching him behind the "mirror" of one-way glass, but he didn't see a crowd gathering outside. Maybe he wasn't such a phenomenon after all.

This man was different. He was a little younger than the guys that had been in so far. He looked haggard, though, a little worse for wear than the cops in their crisp blue uniforms. This guy had serious dark circles ringing his eyes, like a raccoon. He pressed his hands together into steeples, and David thought - - nervous tic. Already. Well, he was going to preempt this one. No way was he going to answer another round of questions without some answers first.

"What am I doing here?"

"No one told you?"

"Yeah, they did, except for the part where they didn't." David leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table a little too hard. Ow. "Listen, you look like a nice guy that got dragged out of bed at a seriously bad hour, and I don't really want to be a problem, but I've been here for hours and I'm getting a little sick of being kept in the dark."

"No one wants to keep you in the dark. I guess - - we were hoping that you'd know why you were here. I was hoping that. I just - - let's start at the beginning, okay?"

David nodded. "Okay. Who are you?"

"I'm Nick Stokes. I work with the Las Vegas crime lab."

"Tit for tat, then. I'm David Kiley. I work with a pharmaceutical research organization in Boston."

"I wanted to know if I could take your fingerprints and maybe a saliva sample for some tests we want to run. Nothing painful, nothing too inconvenient."

"Listen," David said, "if I'm wanted for some kind of crime, I'd like to know about it. I'd also like to know if I need a lawyer present. Because I've never done so much as illegally set off fireworks in my backyard back home, and what I could have possibly done to be wanted in Vegas is beyond me. I was here to interview a client, and I'm supposed to return tomorrow morning. I can't miss my flight."

"You haven't done anything wrong - - David. Everything's fine now."

"Okay. Then why the million questions and the million sample requests?"

"It's a problem of identification," Stokes said. "Three years ago, someone went missing from our organization. You happen to look - - remarkably like him. We've been looking for him for a very long time, and I think we finally have some luck. Please. It - - I promise not to make this take too long. But if you really are the person that we've been looking for all this time - -"

"You think I am," David said. He almost started laughing. "You think I'm some guy you used to know? I've never been to Vegas in my life."

"You look like him," Stokes said. "Please, let us run our tests. We've been waiting so long."

David felt sorry for him. Someone in the organization? This Stokes guy looked like he had lost his best friend, and he was hanging on to David's every movement as if he really, really thought that David might be the person he'd been waiting for. The least David could do for him was sacrifice a couple more minutes, rub his fingers in ink, and let someone stick a swab down his throat. The DNA samples might take a while to replicate, but the fingerprinting always worked much faster, especially if they were running a single comparison through AFIS instead of searching for any kind of - -

_AFIS?_

What did that mean?

"Um, sure," David said. He spread his hands out over the table. "I hope you find who you're looking for."

"So do I."

He let Nick Stokes roll the pads of his fingers in sticky black ink and press them one by one against the paper, letting the tips of his fingers spin like stamps. And he opened his mouth like a kid getting swabbed for strep throat so Stokes could swish something around in there, hollowing out his mouth and pushing against the insides of his cheeks. When he pulled it out, David grinned at him.

"Cheek cell sample," he said.

Stokes paused with the sample an inch above its sealed container. "Yeah. Do you - - do you remember what - -"

"Seventh grade chemistry class stuff," David said, shrugging. "You know. You swabbed your mouth and put that stuff under the microscope so you could look at the epithelials and do the little diagrams. You know, pointing out the nucleus once you'd stained the slide."

"And seventh grade chemistry is the only way you ever heard of this?"

_I'm going to extract - -_

_Extract - -_

"Extraction," David said finally. "Something about extraction. But I don't remember what."

"You can extract DNA from a skin cell," Stokes said. His hands were shaking as he pushed the sample into the container and clicked it closed. "And then you can run all the comparisons you wanted. That's what we're going to do."

"You're going to see if I'm your friend," David said.

"That's right."

_Extract the DNA and compare it to the suspect's. Sorry. No match on the epithelials, no match on the blood. I can't use the hair samples because there's no - -_

_No tag._

He shook his head to clear it. "How long will it be before we know?"

Stokes looked down at his hands. "Can you guess? David?"

"Not so long for the fingerprints," David said. He looked over Stokes's shoulder and stared at the glass. Someone was watching. Right? Of course someone was watching - - wasn't someone always watching? "Longer - - longer for the DNA. It has to replicate."

"Junior high chemistry again?"

David hesitated a second too long.

"I don't know," he said.

Stokes gave him a sad, kind smile and stood, taking the samples and the paper with David's prints with him. He shook hands with David once, but the handshake, like David's pause, lasted just a little too long. Stokes didn't just think that David was who he was looking for, he was almost sure of it.

"Your friend," David said. "Who is he? What's his name?"

"Greg Sanders," Stokes said. "Your name - - his name. Greg Sanders. He went missing three years ago, during one of his first fieldwork assignments. Three years."

David smiled out of pure relief. Ridiculous, of course, to assume that he might be someone else. He knew who he was. David Michael Kiley, the son of Jackson and Sharon Kiley. He worked for a pharmaceutical research company. He had to get home so that he could take care of his father. And any definitions of DNA procedure that had wormed into his mind were just TV technical terms, and he didn't, under any circumstances, remember being someone else. The name Greg Sanders meant nothing. No twinge of familiarity, just a - -

_Greg Sanders._

_One more case, and you'll be certified - -_

Not even a ghost of a memory. Not even.

"I'm sorry for your loss," David said.

Stokes paused at the door. "Don't be."

David leaned his head into one hand, rubbing at a spot above his right eye in a fixed circle. Getting a migraine, and he hadn't had one of those in forever. Might as well bite the bullet and get this over with, clear away any lingering hopes Stokes might have for him. "I'm not your guy. I'm not Sanders. I remember who I was three years ago."

Stokes said, "Do you?"

_The crash_.

The pain above his eye deepened, burrowed in.

Stokes didn't wait for an answer before he left.


	2. The Life and Times

Glad to have you all along! Okay, some back-story information in this chapter, and then the action-based plot starts in the third chapter.

**Chapter Two: The Life and Times**

This time, it wasn't just Stokes. This time, there were other people with him - - two women and two men. All of them looked at David worshipfully - - well, most of them. The older man, the one with the gray hair and the cold eyes, just looked him over, considering him. Stokes's friends all gathered in a loose circle around the table, and David half-expected to be caught up into some kind of strange group embrace. Stokes reached out one hand and wrapped it around David's wrist, too familiar for someone David had just met, and he squirmed a little, moving in the chair and trying to pull away.

The blonde woman's eyes were misty. "Welcome home, Greg."

David said, flatly, "I'm not who you think I am."

Nick Stokes smiled and talked too slowly, as if David simply didn't understand yet. "Your fingerprints are a match, and so is your DNA. Greg." He tacked the name on at the end as if he'd wanted to confirm it before but was now, finally, able to do so.

The dark-haired woman said, "You must have a great story for us."

David sighed. "I'm not Greg Sanders. I don't know who Greg Sanders is."

Stokes said, "Um, Grissom? What do we do?"

Grissom - - the older man - - sat down in the single chair opposite David and folded his hands. There was something familiar about him, but not - - not that that meant anything. He'd seen millions of faces in his life, Grissom could have resembled anyone. Grissom could have been anyone. It was something in the eyes, David decided, looking at him. It was the way his eyes just went right through you, as if he didn't stop at your face but went all the way in to the back of your skull and looked at all the words written across the surface of your mind. As if he studied all the electrical impulses scurrying through the nerve endings and read your intentions, bold-faced. David felt painfully exposed.

"My name is Gil Grissom." He made all the appropriate sweeping gestures to the people behind him. "Warrick Brown. Catherine Willows. Sara Sidle. And Nick Stokes."

"I remember," David said tersely.

Sara's eyes widened. "You remember us? But you said - -"

"I meant that I remember Nick. He was just in here a few hours ago." He switched his focus back to Grissom. Unfortunate circumstances at best. He looked like someone they had cared about, and someone had screwed up a few tests along the way, and he didn't like dashing all those hopes to the ground like that, but what could he do? He wasn't who they wanted him to be. "Mr. Grissom."

"We all work for the Las Vegas crime lab. Until three years ago, so did you."

"I'm not - -"

Grissom held up one hand. "Grant the premise, please - - Mr. Kiley."

"You can call me David."

"David," Grissom said, nodding. "All right. I'm going to tell you everything we know about what happened to Greg Sanders three years ago, and I'm going to ask you a few questions."

"Fair enough."

"Greg was a DNA technician for the crime lab night shift, the best one we ever had. After a few years on the job, he started to be curious about what was happening outside of the lab, and, after he found his replacement, he began working to be certified for fieldwork. He'd be on the outside, working with the team, collecting evidence instead of just analyzing it. It was what he wanted, and it was what he deserved. I believe that he could have been excellent in the field, too. He was on the last step to being approved for full-time fieldwork when he went missing."

"You worked with him," David said. "You were his boss, weren't you?"

For a second, Grissom's eyes looked as bright and transparent with sheer relief as everyone else's. "Do you remember that? Do you remember - -"

"You look like someone's boss."

Grissom rubbed at the rim of his glasses. "Yes. David - - we assigned Greg to a kidnapping case. Kidnapping cases are usually very safe investigations, because the danger is gone by the time our people get to the scene. On paper, everything was done correctly. I was with him at the house, even though we were in separate rooms. The perimeter was secured. And when I went to see how Greg was doing on his collection, he had vanished."

_The smell of fresh-cut lemons._

_Can you - -_

_Can you get Grissom for me?_

"Tell me about yourself, David."

"Can I have a drink?"

Nick moved for the door almost immediately. "Yeah, I'll get you some coffee. We always kept some in the back, your favorite kind - -" He was out again before David could ask him what brand that was, exactly. Nick seemed to have a bad habit of disappearing on short notice.

"Okay - - um, I'm thirty-one. My dad's name is Jackson, my mom is Sharon. I've got a pretty nice apartment with some pretty crappy artwork. I like hockey more than football. I ought to be up for a promotion sometime in March, if I'm lucky." He smiled. "You want more?"

"Tell me some things from your childhood."

"My third grade teacher had a rabbit in the classroom and she let me name it. I used to tape comics in my textbooks in history class because I didn't want to do the reading. I had three detentions in my life, two for tardies and one for being generally a smart-ass. I played baseball in high school for two years, but I spent pretty much the whole time on the bench. I wanted to be a shortstop. On career day, I followed a fireman around and got to pet a Dalmatian."

Grissom was smiling. "Good. Now tell me what you remember about what happened three years ago, late in December."

"Late December, 2004? You can't be serious."

That smile widened. "You don't remember?" Eyebrows were raised.

"Dammit, of course I remember, it's just annoying, picking back through dates. Okay - - um, that was when I was working in Minneapolis. I was a consultant for medical research."

"Details, please, David."

He wasn't stupid, of course, he understood exactly what Grissom was trying to do and he resented it. Grissom was waiting for him to slip up and admit that there were things he could not remember about the December of 2004. Grissom would absolutely love it if David screwed up and said, "And then, about the same time you say your guy went missing, I was in this freak car accident, wrapped myself around a tree and woke up two weeks later, still dopey from all the meds." They'd love that, wouldn't they? But it wasn't the same - - he wasn't Greg Sanders. He still remembered things, even after he'd woken up. He'd told them childhood things, and there was more. He remembered his first kiss, his first car, his first girlfriend, his first best friend - - he knew stuff like that.

And if his selection of memories seemed a little - - finite - - well, not everyone had a damn photographic memory, did they? Just because he got a little bit of a headache when he tried to think too hard about the crash, or about his past, that didn't mean that his past wasn't there.

"Details," he said. "Okay, sure. Why not? I wasn't happy with my job back then, not at all. I kept getting off-track, looking for what I really should have been doing. Nothing felt right and everything seemed wrong. One night, I went out driving. I think I had plans to head west, but I'm not sure. It was like being drunk, I guess, where things like reasons don't seem to matter. I didn't even need a destination. But it was freezing and I remember that I wanted to get warm. I didn't wait for the car to heat up. Florida. California. The desert."

He was going too far, explaining this. So why didn't he stop? Because they looked like people he could trust? Why was that?

"I wanted to get warm again," he said, and curled his hands into fists down there by his sides. "So I started driving along the side roads. I don't know why I didn't just pick an interstate and stick to it all the way to the west or the south, I just - - don't know. I drove by all those fields, with the snow six inches thick on each side of me and somewhere between my house and that last inch of snow, the car slid over ice and everything hit black."

It hurt that they didn't look sorry for him. Grissom, Sara, Catherine, Warrick - - they all looked as if they had seen it coming all along and were glad that he had finally caught up with them. Pick up the pace, David, jeez. Get to the debilitating accident already. If Nick had been there, Nick would have felt sorry for him, would have apologized for bringing up David's life tragedy and swinging it in front of him like a body on a noose, forcing him to get up-close-and-personal with that time-he-almost-died. But Nick was off on some unending search for the proper cup of coffee, and David was left with a dry mouth and an unsympathetic crowd who thought he was a wunderkind they had mislaid somewhere.

"How long was it before you woke up?" Sara asked.

"Two weeks," he said. "So that was my December, people, thanks for asking."

"When you woke up, did you have any memory loss?"

"Sure I had memory loss. I was unconscious for two weeks, some stuff got lost. But nothing like what you'd be talking about. No one coached me back from amnesia. I woke up and answered all those questions - - who's the president? What's my name? When's my birthday? - - and I didn't screw them up. _I _told _them _my name, they didn't tell me."

"Of course."

David pushed one fingernail into the crease between his thumb and first finger, and the pain seemed to steady him. "All right. Why don't you answer some of my questions?"

"Of course," Grissom said, in precisely the same tone.

"Tell me about Sanders."

"He had an absolutely awful taste in music," Grissom said. "He made the best coffee. He liked Robert Frost. He was one of three people I've ever met that would handle a tarantula without flinching. His hair - - his hair was different than yours. A little wilder."

That connected.

"What color?"

Warrick smiled at him. "That changed a lot."

Something there made sense. It was the way his consideration of DNA analysis had wormed its way into his mind without his permission. Now he was thinking of hair dye and hair gel, pressed sticky between his fingers. But Greg Sanders - - he must have - - given up on that a little, when he was trying for fieldwork. He'd tried to look more responsible. More like what they wanted. But this was all just intuition, of course, no real insight. He couldn't be sure unless he asked - - and he didn't intend to ask. Asking would mean admitting the insights that kept striking him sideways.

Nick slid back into the room, holding a brimming cup of coffee. He pressed it into David's hand without a warning for the temperature, and he almost dropped it. He clung to the handle at the last minute and saved himself from a caffeine bath.

"Thanks," he said.

Nick leaned against the table. "Drink it." His eyes were expressionless.

He drank.

At first, it was just the relief of liquid, and warm liquid, at that, quenching his thirst and comforting him, but then the taste hit in a series of electrifying touches across his tongue. Underneath the burning heat, it was - - delicious. Richer than anything he'd ever tasted. He snatched at the cup with both hands, mindless of the way it stung his fingertips, and gulped it down guiltily. He didn't care about how it scorched his throat going down, it was the best he had ever had.

He could feel the steam gathering against his face as he put the cup down.

"What is this? It's delicious."

"Blue Hawaiian," Nick said. "Your favorite."

Okay, maybe it was the best he'd ever tasted and maybe there was something familiar in the way it lingered in his mouth, but that was all, that was it. Didn't prove a damn thing. They were grinning at him as if he had just leapt up and shouted "I'm Greg Sanders" from the rooftop.

He said sullenly, "Thanks."

"You're welcome, Greg."

David closed his eyes.


	3. After Dark

**Chapter Three: After Dark**

So David had a new rule about Vegas: never trust a group of criminalists, however well-meaning, who tell you that you used to be their child prodigy.

He wasn't legally allowed to take his flight back to Minneapolis because they had all ganged-up and rendered his ID invalid, since he wasn't really David Kiley, and then confiscated his rental car, because it was rented on that selfsame invalid ID. Also, it brought up the point of him not having a legal driver's license, either, so he couldn't drive even if he _had _had his rental car. Nick had told him this, and David had retorted that then they could just go ahead and present him with all the proper ID for Greg Sanders, and he could go home _that _way, and maybe he'd send them a Christmas card or something to commemorate the really great time he'd had on this whole detaining process.

Warrick Brown had offered up this solution: "No way in hell."

That was how David found himself wandering around the Las Vegas crime lab at three in the morning, waiting for Nick Stokes to get off work so that he could have a place to stay for the night. They'd all made offers, even Grissom, but Nick was the only one he really liked at this point, so David had resigned himself to waiting. Besides, Nick might have more of that coffee at his house.

In the interim, he was more like a prisoner than a resurrected friend. He wasn't allowed to leave without permission, he had his footsteps dogged by interns, and every time he headed for a phone to call his father, someone very politely intercepted him.

He told Nick, "When I get to your house, can I make a phone call?"

"I can't think of a single reason I'd have to stop you from making a phone call."

That was why he was staying with Nick instead of Grissom, who probably would have psychoanalyzed any reasons he had for making a phone call instead of just consenting.

Also, Nick had given him a roll of quarters and introduced him to the vending machine, saying that since David was going to wait, the least Nick could do was buy him some dinner. He'd bought three packs of Skittles, two Snickers bars, and alternating bottles of orange and grape soda and camped out in the break room, guarding his hoard imperiously. Nick had passed through to grab a sandwich out of the fridge, noted David's junk food stash, and said that he was _definitely_ Greg. David realized that, even with Nick being a basically cool guy, he was going to be putting up with this Greg Sanders crap all night. He'd tried to explain that he'd had his junk food addiction since he was a kid, but when Nick had started trying to hem him into specifics and the memories got fuzzy, David had given up.

Greg Sanders must have had something going for him, after all, if all these people had loved him.

Nick leaned into the doorway. "Ready to go? David?"

That was the one concession he'd finally gotten everyone to accept: even if he were Greg Sanders (which, he had added, he wasn't), he had been David Kiley for the last three year and would like to be David Kiley a little bit longer, and they could just deal with that.

"Ready."

He stuffed the rest of the candy in his pockets and followed Nick outside.

They both stayed silent on the drive, which David could understand. After all, there weren't a lot of conversation-starters involved in their situation. Besides, David was pretty sure that he had never been the person Nick wanted him to be, and Nick was pretty sure he had never been the person he was, so there was _that _insurmountable wall keeping them apart. Nick fumbled for CDs instead and slid one in. David didn't need any hints to catch what was happening: it was some of the music Grissom had been talking about earlier, the punk rock. The kind Greg had liked.

It wasn't bad.

"You like it?"

There was _way _too much casualness injected into that question.

David resisted the urge to nod along with the music as the rhythm got into his head. It felt like thunder, going right along with his pulse. All the surface singing was a cover for the bass, for that _throb_ that made it dancing music, screaming music, unleashed.

"It's okay," he said.

Nick's apartment was spacious enough, and Nick parked him in a spare bedroom, telling him that they could go and pick up his luggage in the morning, but until then, David was welcome to share the clothes. David found a university tee-shirt and some light pajama pants and let Nick make more coffee while he channel-surfed, riding the static waves. He settled on a hockey game and leaned his head back into the cushions, letting the noise of the skaters blend into a blur in his ears. He jumped out of his skin when Nick pressed another cup of coffee into his hands.

"Sorry," Nick said, not sounding too apologetic. "It's been a long day for you, I guess."

David took a gulp of the drink. "Sure. It's not every day you get a whole new name, have all your valid ID revoked, and end up sleeping in someone else's apartment." Another drink, and he at least woke up enough to straighten and slap the side of his face. "Shit. Dad. I forgot."

Nick blinked. "Dad?"

"I was going to call my dad," David said. "The undoing of this whole I-am-Greg thing, don't you think? Wouldn't I, like, not have parents?"

"No," Nick said distantly, "you wouldn't. Phone's on that table."

He managed to reach his house and he got the nurse instead of his father. He had to use every last inch of skill to convince her to stay for a few days more. "I'm stuck in Vegas," he said, praying that she wouldn't ask for details, and being insanely grateful when she didn't. "I'll pay you extra, I promise, I just can't get out right now." She finally agreed, even though she sounded a little unhappy with the whole prospect. Well, the old man could be a little hard to get along with. No, she couldn't put him on the phone, he was sleeping.

David dropped his voice, not sure if he wanted Nick to hear. "When he wakes up, tell him I love him and I'll be home soon, okay?"

She would. She would also call into his work. He thanked her from the bottom of his heart, promised her a colossal bonus, and then hung up, feeling guilty about making small talk while skyrocketing Nick's phone bill on the long-distance.

Nick gave him more coffee and tossed him one of the Snickers bars from his pocket. "Your father isn't doing well?"

David was pretty impressed by how noncommittal Nick had actually made that sound.

"Emphysema," David said. After the last two years, the word didn't sting anymore. It just made him tired, reciting all the gory parts. "He was always a heavy smoker. He's had it for a while now, we think - - he's on his last legs." Suddenly, this was pissing him off. He had a father to get back to. Dad wasn't going to do well on his own, or in the hands of a nurse who wasn't empathic enough to help him. Besides, Dad had never liked nurses. Hated them. Had always preferred David at his side.

"I shouldn't even _be _here," he said, burying his face in his hands. "I should never have taken this client. We didn't even hook him. I'm going to get fired and if he dies while I'm gone - - "

"Tell me about your dad."

"No."

The blunt refusal apparently hurt, because Nick slid down the sofa and didn't look him in the eyes. They were quiet for a few minutes while Nick stared at the hockey game. David watched his eyes, never moving to follow the pattern of skaters across the ice, and felt guilty.

"Why not?" Nick asked finally.

"Because you don't think he's my father."

"No, I don't."

"You think he - - stole me."

"Yes, I do."

"Then," David said, "I don't want to talk about it."

He concentrated on the hockey game again, trying to wrap his head around the symmetry and exchanges he usually had no trouble grasping. Maybe it was the migraine, recurring from earlier, or maybe he was finally crashing from all the caffeine and not enough sleep, but he couldn't focus. What kept circling around his head were just fragments of something that never happened, bits and pieces of a Greg Sanders that he hadn't been and didn't know. Events he couldn't fully remember, interspaced with the details of his own life. Warp and weft. He closed his eyes and let the slide show flash into the black.

Again, that smell of lemons, at first faint, and then heavier, sickeningly-sweet, almost tangible in the room, a neon yellow stamp on his nose. Lemons. Lemon juice. No, too strong, too concentrated - - something fake lemon, artificial, enhanced. That was when he had dropped the flashlight, and he remembered the blunt noise as it collided with the carpeting. He had dropped down beside it on his belly to look underneath the bed and seen the way the blue carpet had faded and was still wet to the touch. Moisture clung to latex in tiny beads.

_Can you get Grissom for me?_

_I think we have a cleanup._

Nick's hand was on his shoulder. "What did you say?"

"I said something?"

"Lemons, I think. Why lemons?"

David inhaled, but all he could smell was the lingering chocolate on his own mouth and the richness of the coffee. Good smells, warm smells, home smells. Nick had a mocha-colored smear on his upper lip, like a mustache in the fading light of the room.

"It was cleanser," he said softly. "Lemon-scented cleanser, to cover up the smell of the bleach. And I remember that they'd moved the bed, because there were indentations in the carpet that were pretty recent. Moved the bed to hide the bleach stain and used the lemon stuff to hide the smell."

"David?"

"I remember," he said. "I remember that. Why do I remember that?"

Nick's hand didn't leave. His fingers were tightening.

"You remember what happened when you went missing? Three years ago? Tell me. Is there anything else? Anything at all could help us find out what happened to you. God, we've been crazy for years. We looked and looked and there wasn't a trace of you - -"

David squeezed his eyes shut, as if by denying light he could bring back the ghosts.

This was impossible. He had never been in the house he was remembering. He had never worn latex gloves to check a bleach stain on someone's carpet. He had never known anyone named Gil Grissom until today, and never called him because he thought that someone had done a cleanup. It was laughable. He was David Kiley, David Michael Kiley, and he had a history, a past, and his own set of memories. But Nick looked at him like he was familiar, and he realized that he was. He remembered that sickening smell of lemons that had filled up nose and almost made him run to the window to throw up. He remembered the weight of the crime-scene kit in his hand, the way the black plastic had rubbed over his skin and started to leave stains like scorch marks across his fingertips. He remembered more than junior high chemistry stuff. This was real. Some of it, at least.

He remembered technicalities. He didn't remember Greg, or being Greg, but for now, things like lemons and DNA extraction were enough to sustain him, either keep him from going crazy or _make _him go crazy. Something had happened to him, he'd start there.

_Come with me._

_Who are you?_

_I'm the father._

"David? Greg? What do you remember?"


	4. Descent

Note: Although a flashback in terms of story, this isn't a "memory"-flashback. David/Greg doesn't remember all of this, yet, it's just to inter-space the past with the present so the story is a little less confusing. David is still basically clueless.

- - - - - - - - - - -

**Chapter Four: Descent**

_"Good luck today," Nick said, passing him his field kit. "You'll do just fine. It's a kidnapping case. You know this stuff, we went over it a million times when you were passing all your written exams. You know the drill. Just don't let Grissom stress you out too much or you'll go wonky." He paused and rewound his last few words, shaking his head. "Wonky. You're rubbing off on me."_

_Greg was too nervous to laugh. "Sorry," he said, weighing the kit in his hand. "Guess I'm infectious."_

_"You are." Nick looked him over, and repeated, kindly, but with a hint of impatience, "You'll do just fine."_

_"Okay." He held out his hand. "Wish me luck."_

_"Greg, I've wished you luck, like, three times already."_

_"Once more ought to do it, then, I think," he said, and let his hand hover in the air until Nick grabbed it and squeezed. "Good. Third or fourth time's the charm. Now cast me down with the beasts, and - -"_

_"Greg?"_

_"Oui?"_

_"Grissom would have never let you get this far if he didn't think that you were going to make it all the way," Nick said. Greg checked his face - - he was serious. Well, Nick was an optimist, admittedly, but also pretty good at knowing what people were all about, so maybe - - maybe - - this was true._

_"Thanks," he said, erring on the side of caution._

_Nick patted him on the shoulder._

_And that was the last time Greg Sanders - - or David Kiley - - saw Nick Stokes for the next three years. Grissom came and collected him, sweeping him along the hallway and down into the waiting Tahoe. During the first days of becoming David, Greg wished just a little that he had looked back along the hall and given Nick a wave or something. But when all was said and done, "Thanks" wasn't a bad word to use when leaving your best friend._

_In the car, he was silent, so silent, in fact, that Grissom was the one who tried to start a conversation. Greg was polite, but he was too nervous to carry the thread of a continuing discussion, and the fabric of words unraveled in his head, tugging until it disintegrated into a pile of wool. Grissom gave up after the one attempt - - when it came to conversation, Grissom wasn't the model of persistence - - and let the quiet hold the two of them._

_The house was nice - - neatly painted and landscaped with shrubbery - - and Greg was impressed by it in a distant, abstract kind of way. Sure, the idea of a graffiti-laden apartment with suede couches had been appealing when he'd actually bought it, but if he became an actual CSI, he'd need an actual house._

_Eventually. Kind of. He figured he could still keep the couches._

_"Okay," Grissom said, stopping the car, "you know the drill. I'll do the interviews," and here he grimaced slightly, "because you're the one who needs to check the scene."_

_"Got it, boss."_

_He peeled himself off the sheet, endured the teasing from the cops - - called a geek enough in high school, you got used to being called a geek in your chosen career - - and breezed inside, straight past the family. He didn't look at them because he'd been hoping to avoid seeing the anguish written in capital letters across their foreheads, but he could hear the hiccupping sounds of crying and the smell the bittersweet scent of saline. He wanted to look away even more, walk even faster, but then guilt slowed him down until he looked almost normal, strolling up the stairs. It would be bad to let himself get freaked on his last proficiency test, but it was one of the cases that was nasty to think about. Three-year-olds didn't saunter out of their bedrooms at night. The kid - - Benny Lowe - - had been taken._

And that's why you're here, genius_, he scolded himself. _Now get in the game.

_Benny's room was nice for a little kid's, themed in blue. It was spotless. Even the covers were barely rumpled. Greg snapped a few pictures and circled the bed, photographing the neat blankets. Something suspicious there. He had never slept so restfully when he was little - - his comforter had always ended up on the ground in a puddle, his sheets had been torn from underneath the mattress and wrapped around him in a cocoon, and a teddy bear tucked under his chin._

_And yeah, he'd always been a little twitchy, still was, but Greg was taking it as a rule of thumb that no little kid slept as soundly as these blankets were - -_

_What was that _smell?

_Lemons. He smelled lemons._

_"Am I having a stroke?" he said aloud, wonderingly, and then his head cleared. He'd covered this when they'd done his training. Someone had done a hasty clean-up job in here, and they hadn't had time to shop around and do comparison prices for an unscented cleanser._

_He looked down, and saw the marks in the carpet - - four of them, pressed into the shag. Not just a clean-up, then, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide even the sign of the clean-up. Lots and lots of effort. Pretty sick, methodical puppy at work here._

_He slid down on his stomach to look under the bed. He had to lift the ruffled spread to get a look, but yes - - there it was, the bleach stain he'd expected, overdosed on lemons. He stretched out one hand and brushed a finger over the carpet, still slightly damp._

_He raised his head and called into the hall, "Can you get Grissom for me? I think we've got a cleanup."_

_"What are you doing in this house?"_

_He sat up so fast a lightning bolt seemed to strike him between the eyes. The man in the doorway was like a block of stone, unmoving, granite-like, and stern. He was carved from the face of a mountain._

_"You get past the cops?" His face cleared. "Oh, you're family."_

_The man said nothing except, "What are you doing in this house?"_

_"I'm with the crime lab," Greg said, pushing his hand against his vest to highlight the name and emblem. This wasn't right. Where were the cops, anyway? Shouldn't they have stopped him, even if was family? No, this wasn't good at all. "What . . . what happened to the cops out there?"_

_The man smiled. "They're gone now."_

_"They're gone. Like, on a coffee break?"_

_"They're gone now."_

_"And this is all very déjà vu. Where did they go?"_

_His hands were sweating and he rubbed them over his pants, hoping the movement was inconspicuous enough not to be noticed as a weakness. His radio wasn't that far away. He could reach it, couldn't he, and do that casually enough? If he just stretched out his arm and snaked it on over - - and say something super-bland to Grissom, "Come up and help me with this stain" or "I'm out of Q-tips", or, hell, if he was running out of time, "Grissom, there's some guy up here and I don't like it, I don't like how he looks and I think things have gone to hell in a hand-basket, not to put too fine a point on it."_

_"They went away," the man said, stepping closer._

Okay, Sanders, talk it through. He's moved. There's a space behind him now that I could get out if I really tried. They taught you that in hand-to-hand - - always look for an escape route before you look for a way to fight the guy in front.

_"They went away," he said, because apparently the repetition was as infectious as his own vocabulary. Time to break that trend and make a few things clear. "Who are you?"_

_"You can call me Jackson."_

_"But - - that's not what other people call you?"_

_The man ignored his question completely. "Come with me."_

_"Who are you?"_

_"I'm the father."_

_"You're the father - - um, Jackson . . . Lowe?"_

_He sidled to the wall and felt the pulse of the radio in his hand. He raised it to his lips and tried to say Grissom's name, but Jackson was suddenly knocking it out of his hand. It smashed against a dresser in a cough of electronics, disconnected wires spilling onto the floor. Greg opened his mouth to scream but couldn't, because a meaty hand was closed over his lips and his head was tilted backwards. His neck made a curious popping noise, but no pain - - spinal cord intact - - just a flash of bone sliding back into its proper place. Oh - - oh. He couldn't breathe, Jackson's finger was taut against his nose as well as blocking his mouth. All airways obstructed, General._

_Jackson said patiently, "Your name is David Kiley."_

_He thrashed his head to the side, and Jackson's hand peeled up just enough to allow him a single violent gulp of air before his lips were closed again._

_"Your name is David Kiley."_

_"Mm - - Gr - -"_

_Couldn't breathe. Couldn't breathe. Didn't going without air cause brain damage? How could he even think? No systems functioning. His chest was breaking into pieces._

_"Your name is David Kiley. Say it."_

_He was given air. Air. Oh sweet. He was thinking like a Neanderthal - - air good, Jackson bad. Breathe in, breathe out, how sweet the taste, oh yes. That atrocious lemon overpowering it ceased to matter, the air was just air, and he was never, ever going to let it go unappreciated again. It was like a resurrection._

_Jackson smiled at him, almost indulgent._

_"Your name is David Kiley. Say it."_

_"Who are you?" he said, when he could finally tear himself away from the beauty of taking in air long enough to give it away in syllables. He whispered it, saying it as he exhaled. "Who are you?"_

_"I'm the father," Jackson said lovingly, and again covered his mouth._

_Greg descended._


	5. Who You Were

**Chapter Five: Who You Were**

Nick had given him more coffee and then called Grissom, so in two hours, David was jittery from caffeine and perched on the edge of Nick's sofa while two men sat across the room and systematically threw questions at him, each demand and inquiry taking away a little more of what he had, twenty-four hours ago, considered immutable fact. The only solution was more coffee and less thinking, so he gulped it down, ignored how it burned his tongue, and set his mouth on automatic to answer their queries without a single thought to what this meant or him. They wanted an autobiography of words, for him to tell them everything he could remember about his childhood. Sometimes Grissom would nod and remark on how thorough it was, how precise, but then he would hit a spot of ice in the black where his feet would slide out from under him - - curious blank patches on the terrain of his mind - - and he would have to admit that he did not remember, that there was no answer, and Nick would be somehow kindly triumphant, as if he understood how hard this must be was nonetheless grateful that he, Nick, was being proved correct time and time again as the icy ground spread and made the whole room arctic with lost history.

"Tell me about a field trip you took in elementary school," Grissom said. "Any one at all."

"Pilgrims," David said. "In the second grade, they took us to this fake pilgrim village out in the country, and they showed us how to churn butter and make candles."

Grissom leaned forward, Nick leaned back, and David thought that he had maybe won that round, that he was one step closer to proving that Greg Sanders and the lingering scent of lemons were just phantoms induced by all this talk of him being someone else. But, as he concentrated, he could prove himself wrong. He remembered cookie-cutter facts of a pioneer village, but there was nothing to fill in the holes. He couldn't remember the season, whether the grass had been lushly green under his Keds or whether it had crackled with drying brown leaves. He couldn't remember a circle of friends. He couldn't remember how to churn butter or make candles, he could just remember, academically, the way he remembered long-ago facts from tests, that he had learned these things.

Nick asked to hear about David's music classes. Had he played an instrument? Had he taken choir?

His feet hit ice and slid out from under him. He landed hard in the chill of the snow, and sipped his coffee to lure himself away from this metaphor for memory. "I don't remember," he said. He was beginning to be horrified at the gaps that were presenting and widening. He had never noticed them before. He had only known that introspection gave him a headache, and so he had never tried to pry apart his own psyche. Now he wondered how many doors led to empty rooms, and as much as he hated this inquisition, he was eager for it to continue, to reveal what he had never been able to find before.

"Interesting," Grissom said. "You can remember comparatively obscure facts."

"It's a pretty big oversight," Nick said. "But it makes sense. It was easy to believe who he was when he was rattling off all the weird specifics. Remembering enough little things keeps you from noticing when the bigger things are missing."

David was feeling curiously ignored, and wanted more questions. He didn't want to have to sit there and listen to two men he barely knew (and barely liked only one of them) discuss his spotty amnesia. He wanted answers, even if they were only there for his own benefit. He wanted to know how much was missing, like a man taking an inventory of his looted house. And somehow, he could not present the right questions to himself. Whatever ones he formed, he could answer, as if he lacked the capacity for even thinking of something he should remember, but didn't. He needed them to expose the holes so he could fill them, bury them, and forget them again.

He cleared his throat. "Keep going," he said, not caring how he sounded, not caring that his hands were shaking as he raised the mug to his lips. "More questions."

Nick looked at Grissom, giving him the turn. Grissom rubbed one hand over his beard, and suddenly, a gear whirred in David's head and he pointed, careful to keep his spare hand wrapped around his cup. No matter how friendly Nick was, people tended to get a little upset if hot coffee ended up all over their clean upholstery. His finger hovered in midair, stark still, as if condemning Grissom.

"You didn't always have a beard," he said. "Did you?"

He realized that he sounded ridiculous and jerked his hand back down so hard that it made an indentation in the sofa. He curled it into a fist and pressed it against his thigh. They were staring at him, no longer quite as relieved that he might be Greg Sanders, but instead a little afraid that they were maybe in the room with a crazy person.

"I don't mean that you didn't have a beard when you were twelve or anything," he said, trying purposefully and unsuccessfully to keep his voice light and irritated. "I mean that - - you were clean-shaven - - sometime. Before."

Was this how revelations were going to go? Greg Sanders must have been one screwed-up individual. He wasn't getting flashes of friends, family, or emotions. He was getting distorted radio signals of DNA extraction, lemons, and a man who had grown a beard and - -

_"And, not that I want to jeopardize what precious job security I feel I have, but, Grissom, I have to ask - - what were you thinking? Listen, it's not too late to fix it. A trusty Gillette and some gel will fix you right up and in a month, no one will remember that you had something crawling all over your face. And would right now be bad time to ask if I can have another shot at the field?"_

Grissom was saying, "You're right. You knew me - - Greg knew me - - before I grew the beard. And for a year or so afterwards. You - - he - -" Grissom frowned, apparently regarding pronouns, in this case, to be an extreme nuisance, "didn't like it very much."

"Well," David said, shifting uncomfortably, "I wasn't going to _say _anything . . ."

Nick, for some reason, found that hysterical, and laughed so hard that he had to excuse himself in the kitchen under the pretense of getting more coffee and maybe some snacks, but David could hear him laughing. The walls were paper thin and Nick had a loud laugh. It was a fun laugh, a good laugh, one that made him want to join in despite the fact that Nick was having his hearty good time at what was sort of David's expense, but at least Nick was a nice enough guy to try and pretend that this wasn't so.

"You remembered that I didn't have a beard," Grissom said.

"Of all the things," David agreed, nodding.

He was trying to be cautious. He couldn't afford to get too chummy with these people. They were being nice, sure - - but they thought he was someone else. Maybe he even was, but he didn't want to be. He wanted to go home, go to work, take care of his father, meet someone, get married, have the whole picket fence and two-point-five kids deal, the works - - None of that would happen if he were Greg Sanders. If he were Greg Sanders, he'd have to stay here and take up the reins of a life he'd completely forgotten - - and maybe good riddance to it. Who said that Greg Sanders had been such a great guy?

A CSI wannabe, by all accounts. A guy who remembered someone else's beard before he'd remember his own life. A guy who didn't care enough about his history to stop it from being wiped away. Yeah, that was who he wanted to be for the rest of his life. Yeah right.

Except if they were right, and he'd been Greg, then maybe there had been some kind of fight after all. Maybe Greg was the reason his memory had so many holes in it, and maybe Greg fighting to come back now, fighting through with whatever images or sensations he could manage. Lemons. A brief exchange of sarcasm. An undeniable feeling that these people were familiar, were good, were trustworthy. Whatever was left of a dead man, trying to bring himself back to life. Maybe they'd had every reason to look at him as if he were Lazarus.

No.

That couldn't be true. He wouldn't allow it to be true. He wouldn't allow himself to be Greg, to accept that he had ever been anyone else. The flashes were irrelevant. They were dreams, they were hallucinations; he would be more willing to believe that he had a tumor, that he was lying prone in some hospital while this fantasy played out through his head, that he was in _Oz_ - - then he would believe that he was not himself. Surely that was basic psychology. Tamper with someone's identity, and you spun about the fulcrum of their world.

Nick returned with coffee and milanos. David devoured chocolate and licked his fingers.

Grissom asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question. "Tell me about your father."

"I asked him that already," Nick said, his words crumbling around the cookie in his mouth. "He won't answer. He's still smarter than you sometimes, Grissom, and he knows when you're trying to trick him."

David ate another cookie. He was getting better at waiting for other people to decide what happened to the next few minutes of his life, and it was a little easier to lie in wait now that he was determined to _not _be who they wanted him to be. Now that he was determined to win the war, he could sacrifice a few minor battles.

"It's important that we find out about his father."

He licked a crumb off his finger and smiled. "It's cool, Nick, I'll tell him." He made himself look at Grissom, made his smile widen until it split his face in two. "Just - - no midnight drives over to Minneapolis to arrest someone you've never met, okay? Whatever you think you know about me, you don't know jack about my father, either way. You don't know that he has anything to do with this - -"

"Except he's somehow managed to convince you that he's your father, which suggests his complicity - -"

What do you know? Grissom had a temper buried under all that cool after all. David was actually a little touched. He'd been right before - - Greg had had this, at least, this makeshift family.

"For now," David said calmly, "leave my father out of it."

"For now."

He turned to Nick. "Can I believe him?"

"Grissom doesn't make promises he doesn't intend to keep," Nick said. "And neither do I. Fine, no one goes near your father - - yet - - but no word of this gets back to your city. If he's the guy who snatched you three years ago, I don't want the son-of-a-bitch to have a chance to run."

David decided to ignore that mild threat and make it part of his background noise. Instead, he switched his attention back to Grissom and started talking about his father. Jackson Kiley. He sketched in a brief timeline, charting his father's movement across America in his youth as an army brat and occasionally peppering the story with remembered anecdotes. He moved to his own childhood relationship, skipping over the bad parts that still hurt sometimes, unexpectedly, and ignored the parts of his tie to the old man that loomed upwards and threatened to overwhelm him. Instead, he told stories of fixed bikes, rides to school, help with math homework, and left out the crippling fear that had come over him sometimes, left out the bruises that the long-sleeved shirts had always been able to hide. He told lovingly of the good times, ignored the nightmarish ones, and worked his way to the present, to Jackson's emphysema that had made him dependant.

"It really frustrates him," David said. "For as long as I can remember, he's been the kind of man who liked to stand alone. And now he has to take his lumps on his chin like everyone else - - and he needs help getting out of bed - - hell, some days he can't even breathe without help . . ."

He felt the moisture gathering in his eyes and scrubbed at them with his fingertips, feeling hot and ashamed for this premature grief, and getting flashes of past in his head that had nothing to do with Greg at all, just his own childhood, reflected grotesquely back at him through a funhouse mirror:

_"Shut up! Stop crying!"_

And then, weirdly:

_"Say it."_

What?

_"Say it. Your name is David Kiley, say it."_

_That _wasn't part of any childhood he remembered, but the voice was the same. It was the way his father had always sounded, commanding and somehow sweet as honey, just as he was giving David some instructions or telling him what he had done wrong. But he _knew _that that wasn't right - - whatever bizarre rituals Dad had designed for the two of them when he was a kid, saying his name like a catechism had never, ever been one of them. It had been used often enough, sure: David, come here. David, put that down. David, shut your mouth. David, I love you. You know that, David. David, I do this because I love you and I want to keep you safe.

"David."

Grissom was looking at him with too much concern and too many echoes of someplace else.

"David, are you all right? Greg?"

"I'm fine," he said.

"I don't think so." Nick was an inch away from him, suddenly, rubbing something rough over his skin. David's eyes unwillingly focused on it - - a scrap of white chasing liquid across his forearm. Dishcloth. "You just spilled hot coffee on your hand and you didn't even blink. I think you ought to go to bed. We can pick this up in the morning."

"I think I'd rather not pick it up again at all, actually." He looked at the half-empty cup, considered the blanket of sleep that was already overtaking him, and then glared at Nick. "How long have I been drinking decaf?"

Nick shrugged, unrepentant. "A while now."

"You were drinking it by the gallon," Grissom said gently. "It wouldn't have been good for you to sit up all night, not with all this to think about."

But he'd _wanted _the damn coffee, hadn't he? Hadn't he wanted the time to think, even if the thoughts would be black and nervous, spurred on by surges of caffeine through his bloodstream? Maybe it was stupid, but it had been his choice, and they had no more right to steal away his choice than they had to steal away his life. Little violations, edging in on the edges of his subconscious, and somehow endearing themselves to him at the same time. He had trusted them, and somehow the betrayal of the coffee was greater than the betrayal of his own identity.

"I'm sleeping on the sofa," he said to them. "Move it."

They got off the sofa and he kicked his legs up in a half-circle. His feet dropped against Nick's throw pillow, and his arm swung out in an arc and nudged the coffee mug onto the tabletop. Wiggling downwards, he yanked the blanket beneath his chin, his arm snapping up so quickly that his hand struck against the side of his face, and he turned his head into the back of the sofa to hide his own grimace of pain. Childish, but necessary.

He closed his eyes and heard Nick walk Grissom to the door. A beat later, and Nick was sitting by his feet.

"You're angry with us," Nick said. "Over coffee."

"I'm angry with you over a lot of things."

"But it takes coffee to really, really hammer in and break you. You haven't changed one bit. I remember one day, you had about twenty cases rolling through DNA, and everyone bitching at you to hurry up, to get their results out first. Even me. It wasn't a good day for any of us, but really not for you. And Grissom gave you the dressing-down of your life, he was so pissed, and you just kind of sat there, nodding. You said that things would blow over, that Grissom would feel bad and take you out to lunch or something. And then you went for coffee, and there wasn't any, and right there, in the break-room, you had a blow-up. I think you broke a cup. The dayshift people wouldn't go near you for three weeks."

"Nick?"

"Yeah?"

"Stop telling me things that I'm supposed to remember," David said quietly. "I don't remember them, and hearing about them doesn't make me happy."

The glow from between the blinds cut Nick's face into dark and light partitions. A shadow laid across his eyes and a neon yellow band illuminated his mouth, caught in a tight frown, even, white teeth pressed against his lower lip.

"I'm just saying that you're still the same," Nick said.

He sounded forlorn, abandoned. David could have made things better then just by sitting up and telling him that it was okay, or even telling him that there were things that he did remember, and one of those things was that Nick could be trusted. But he didn't make it better. He closed his eyes again.

"I'm not even the same person," he said. "Good night."


	6. Bringing the Moon

I need to apologize for the long break between chapters, especially since I can't guarantee that it won't happen again. My life is pretty crowded right now, but this story is still very important to me, and I intend to finish it. Hopefully, I can resume a posting schedule that is at least semi-regular, and I sincerely apologize for how long it took to get this one up.

**Chapter Six: Bringing the Moon**

He thought that the dreams would be his undoing.

There seemed to be centuries off them, even more than _two _lifetimes, though two were more than he should have had. The dreams passed through his mind, never lingering long enough to explain themselves, the very rudest of visitors. No image remained for more than a second, none of them clarifying, almost all of them hurtful. He was drowning on dry land, someone's hand pressed against his mouth, pinching his nostrils shut, and he was trying to scream for help but whenever he was allowed air, his voice was gone and all that remained was a whisper, was the whisper: _I'm not, I'm not, I'm - - I'm Greg - - _and then all light was stolen from him, spirited away with his air, and then something snapped inside of him with a clear, brittle break, and he heard, echoing over and over again in his ear: _I'm David. I'm David. Oh God, I'm David._

And then the air was given, like a present, like the best gift, and David drank it in, understanding that it was a reward. He was given air and water and food that filled him, and he scooped it into his hands, not bothering with the silverware, because it had been _forever _since food, since water, since air. Clean clothes and soaped skin. He touched his temples, and it seemed he remembered something there, there - - a flash, a crown, pale blue arches - -

It was gone now.

Now he was watching the moon. Someone was talking to him, telling him a story. His story. He didn't need to listen anymore because he already knew all the words, but he watched himself listen, watched the slackness of his mouth as the information was taken and absorbed, was accepted as gospel because it came from above, came from the person who gave him food, air, shelter, water, love - - because he was loved, yes, he _knew _that - -

And he knew how unbearably good it felt to be loved.

The moon had taken away everything else.

In his dreams, in his sleep, Greg felt tears on his face, and looked away from who he was becoming, and the man who was David Kiley looked straight ahead and watched his own birth.

What finally saved him was he fell off the couch.

Nick had fallen asleep in the armchair to his left, and David was simultaneously furious and relieved. He scrubbed at his cheeks, knowing he was rubbing them pink but not caring, as long as they were dry. Nick stirred when David bumped his knee on the table, the second crash awakening him where the first had not. He started, and David turned his face into the couch, pressing his damp eyes against the upholstery, pretending sleep.

"Greg?" Nick cleared his throat. "David?"

_Shut up. Go away. Leave me alone._

How on earth did you forgive someone for taking away everything you had? And even more importantly, how did you tell them that they were right? He was one step away from a padded room if he told Nick that he remembered electricity and swaying moons taking away Greg and letting David slide into his conscious and then his subconscious. And how did he say that?

Nick would leave. His father had taught him that. _Sooner or later, David_, he had said, _people always leave. Except family. Family means forever. _Said between the whispering breaths and the whir of the respirator, it was the best advice his father had ever given him, and one of the few mantras he had ever taken completely to heart. Now it meant something else. Now it meant that his attachment to his father and his lack of friends weren't borne of adherence to a family value but as simple conditioning. Now, being alone didn't mean that he was aloof, a lone wolf, unmistakably cool. Now it just meant that he was Pavlov's dog, backing away from friendship on cue.

But still, conditioning or not, that didn't change the truth. Nick would leave, because Nick was a nice guy, but blood ties were the only ties and Nick was going to disappear.

Then Nick sat down at the end of the sofa, next to David's feet, and he waited.

"I know that you're awake," Nick said, and waited a beat. David kept his face against the side of the sofa and screwed his eyes shut. He wished he could do the same with his ears. "I know that this is scary, David, but it's real. We made some mistakes. We shouldn't have expected you to remember us from the beginning, that was wrong. That was . . . unfair of me, and I'm sorry."

He turned his head just slightly. "I've been dreaming."

Nick nodded. If David had been expecting even a flicker of surprise on Nick's face at discovering that he had an audience, he didn't get one.

"Bad dreams?"

"I think so," he said, and considered it. There were too many sides to it, not light/dark like the metaphorical flipped coin, but varying shades of real and unreal, like a top spun too fast to separate the individual facets. "Mostly just dreams. Very weird dreams. I don't know what's happening to me." He wondered if Nick would interrupt, but Nick, having made his speech and his apology, seemed content to let David explain what he would. "If you'd asked me a week ago," he continued, "I would have said that all this was impossible. It still seems that way. I used to know who I was, and that - - that's a good thing to be certain of. If you don't know who you are, you're a good way down the road to crazy."

Nick nodded. David watched the patch of light on the side of his face move up and down.

"A good way down the road to crazy," David repeated. "And since I met you, I've been seeing a few street signs labeled that way."

"What did you dream about?"

"Your guy, Greg Sanders. And me."

Nick nodded again. David could feel him shifting positions as the couch cushion underneath him slid an inch or so to the left. "I don't know what you want me to tell you, David."

David smiled. "I'd like it a lot if you could tell me that I'm dreaming now. That I'm still home and still who I am - - whoever that is. And that I've only ever lived one life. Think about it, Nick. Imagine someone telling you that you're not you. That you were someone else, and these people that want you back are good people, yeah, I can see that, but you can't just pick and choose who you're going to be out of all the stuff that's in your head, because there's so much of it, all of it layered on top of something else, and if you scrape the surface you're just getting another layer. An identity onion. All these sheaves of memories and experiences that go over what I'm not supposed to see. _That's _what I was dreaming, if you really want to know."

"Does it make you afraid of us?"

"What?"

Nick repeated his question patiently. "All of these contrasting memories, who you think you are and who you remember being, and now these dreams - - are you afraid of us?"

"Of Grissom, maybe. Not you." It sounded sentimental, so he rephrased it, shaping the words into bullets and then throwing them out to shatter the self-satisfaction in Nick's face. "Don't misunderstand. I resent you a hell of a lot and it's bordering on hate half the time, but I'm not _scared_ of you."

"All right."

David sighed suddenly, and sat up straight. That was wrong. He didn't have to know Greg to realize that Nick had been the one he'd been closest to, and he didn't have to be Greg to see that he could still stick a knife in pretty far between Nick's ribs, if he wanted to. Taunting him while he was wearing the ghost of Nick's old best friend was cruel, and petty, and he'd never been either one of those. Comparing his own gut feelings to the dull look of concealed shock on Nick's face, he decided Greg hadn't been, either.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was out of line."

"You meant it."

"No, I didn't. I didn't mean it and I shouldn't have said it."

"Fine, you're forgiven."

And he was. It was weird, that that felt good. His father had always picked battles before handing out forgiveness, he'd always made it a competition, so that if David had made a mistake, he was practically a slave for the next week trying to make up for it before some small gesture from Jackson Kiley would prove that David was still loved, still valued. He'd done his share of penance for offenses smaller than this one, but Nick was wiping his slate clean with hardly a second thought.

"If you want to talk about something else, that's fine," Nick said.

"I think I need to talk about this, but thanks. Can you - - um . . . can you tell me something about Greg? Maybe it'll ring a bell. Not vital statistics, or anything, but . . . a story. Like you did before."

"Sure." Nick moved again, his hands now dangling between his legs. "You - - Greg - - he went undercover for us once, his second time in the field. I teased him about it afterwards, I said that he wanted to be a cop, not a criminalist, and if he thought that all fieldwork was going to be that interesting, he was dead wrong. He laughed. He said that he knew I loved my job."

Something was connecting, two forbidden circuits making contact. He spun his hand through the air impatiently, urging without words.

"He said that he used to love his, too, and he wanted to have the chance again - - to do something that he loved, instead of just something that he _understood_. I started to say that he got it out of a fortune cookie, but he looked serious, and for someone who was hardly ever serious, that made it a big deal. So I nodded, and I told him that I'd see what we could do. That maybe I could talk to Grissom."

"You - - you said - - you said not to worry about it." David breathed in, gulped down air. And even that triggered more memories, like the dream, when air had been a reward instead of a given. "You said that things always worked out, that Grissom would see - -"

"That he wanted it," Nick said, nodding. "I said that Grissom would see that you wanted it, see how you wanted it more than anything, and that would be good enough for Grissom."

"I remember that."

"I kind of guessed."

David folded his hands, knitted them together behind his neck. "I'm going to have to do something about this," he said. "If I'm not going crazy, then I'm really going to have to do something about this."

The patch of light on Nick's face caught the faintest glimmer of teeth, widening in a smile. "You're not crazy," Nick said. "We'll deal with it, okay? I promise. Whatever you want to happen in the morning, we'll work our way through this. We'll - - we'll get you straightened out again."


End file.
